Free The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer Page B

to hear someone who obviously was not an adult, Anna demanded to speak to my mother.
    “She is at her office at the university,” I said, thinking I was talking to yet another Russian mathematician.
    “Ay, ay, ay, she said she would be here. She would take care of me.” And I knew instantly what this was about.
    “You are in what city? Chicago?”
    “Yes.”
    “Where?” I could sense she was worried about giving this information. “I’m the boy who was with my mother and father backstage,” I tried to explain. “I will go to my mother’s office. We will drive to meet you. But you need to tell me where.”
    My uncle drove the first new car he ever owned, a Chevy Impala. My mother rode shotgun, and I sat in the back of the car reading Gogol or some other Russian writer. In our home, reading was more important than conversation. When there were no guests at night, sometimes the only noises you could hear were the creaking of chairs, the sipping of tea, and the almost silent sound of pages being turned.
    I was having a hard time concentrating, though. I was giddy. I might have to live on the living room couch for the rest of my years at home, but this was something far better than watching a TV spy thriller like
The Man from U.N.C.L.E
. We were a part of a real piece of Iron Curtain intrigue. Plus I could tell that my mother was so proud of me for keeping my wits and writing down everything we needed for this freedom mission: the name of the woman, the exact address where she was hiding, and the precise meeting time.
    But the truth was that—like most events that sound so exciting on paper—picking up this ballerina was a mundane thing. We parked our car along an elm-lined street of three-story brick apartment buildings, were buzzed into one of them, a door was opened, and there she was, a frightened woman perhaps twenty-one years old in the apartment of a Polish hotel maid.
    OK, it was not entirely mundane. This ballerina was, to a thirteen-year-old boy, the quintessence of beauty, lean and graceful, delicately featured, exuding natural elegance, her long dark hair in a bun. We took her to an FBI office in Chicago, where she formally defected, and we filled out what seemed like a ream’s worth of papers attesting to our willingness—without any promise of help or aid on the part of the U.S. government—to house and protect this defector from harm until she would be formally accepted as a legal resident of the United States.
    They would become a formidable pair, my mother and Anna. Physically, they were so different. My mother towered over her dark-haired, olive-skinned, diminutive ward. In other ways, too, they contrasted. My mother had her overpowering intellect. Anna, so self-possessed that she scared all but the most confident and foolish of men, had her physicality. Perhaps you could count me as one of the foolish ones. Unlike any of the others, she would never toss me aside when she grew bored. I was as close to a brother as she would have. Tell me, what man doesn’t want a self-assured, beautiful sister who men look upon with desire? You are the one man with whom she shares her secrets. You are the one who has a piece of her heart forever.
    Anna’s defection was a two-inch story in major newspapers across the country. It was something buried on page fourteen, next to ads for things like Pall Mall cigarettes. Who cares about ballerinas, even world-class ones, in this oh-so-practical country?
    Anna would go on to perform in New York for many years, and then move to Los Angeles to marry a movie director. This marriage—one of three total—would last for six years. She taught dance, and even worked with my cousin for a time, helping out with choreography for his TV specials. She would usually come to Madison once a year to spend time with the family that had generously given her a new home. After my mother was diagnosed, Anna started calling her once or twice a week and flying in on occasional